A few years ago everyone in the northwestern part of the United States over the age of 47 was on the protein diet; people loved the Atkins Diet. Why wouldn’t they? The basic diet consisted of a bacon and eggs breakfast, hamburgers without buns for lunch, and steak minus the potatoes for dinner.

I think the fad ended when Dr. Atkins died. Not necessarily because of the Atkins diet, but it did tend to make people wary of the diet. (Read this article from Snopes for the complete scoop on whether or not Dr. Atkins’ death was tied to a heart attack or not.)

I never got the idea behind the diet so much, but I did see several people actually lose weight from the Atkins diet, which made carbohydrates the number one bad guy food in the United States.

I think that the biggest reasons that people lost weight on the diet was that they cut out all of the crap from their diets. (OK, most of the crap. If you can forgive the fatty sides of beef that people ate on their diets.)

Hello, did it not occur to anyone before the Atkins diet that Big Gulps of Coke were not healthy or that huge bags of Doritos were not good for weight? Because I’m pretty sure that chips and potato chips are not the lowest calorie foods around and that cutting them out of a diet would make a tremendous difference in someone’s life.

Or is the idea that eliminating chips and other carbohydrate processed crap from the diet was the major factor for weight loss completely crazy? Or did the people that lost weight on the Atkin’s diet really lose weight just because they stopped drinking fruit juice and avoided bananas altogether? (The sugar factor is also a key element of the Atkins diet.)

It’s really hard to say what worked and didn’t work, just as it’s hard to determine whether or not Dr. Atkins did in fact die of heart-attack related causes. It is easy to question the healthiness of the Atkins diet in terms of the long-term health risks of eating too much fatty meat--long thought by the medical community to be a definite bad thing--but again, it’s hard to quantify the Atkins Diet formula to determine the exact health risks of such a strange diet.

Have you ever been on the Atkins Diet? What did you think about it?